Coming up on this episode of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball, we're going to do a recap of Pinball Expo. We've got Ellen John, Labyrinth, Prices Are Plummeting, and also Venom Impressions. All that and more, coming right up. Double Super Jackpot! I need a loop I want targets I can hit I need the scoop I need a double super jackpot in my life That's right And now, the Hall & Oates of Pinball Podcasting, Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. Whoop-boom-shakalaka! What's going on, everybody? Welcome to yet another episode of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball? Episode 81. It's November 12th, 2023. I'm Kevin. That's Nick. Hi, Nick. How's it going? We did it. I woke up today and got up at like 9 and Martha started talking to me about the Kardashians or some shit. And I was like, I got a show to do. I don't have time for this. I've got a show to put on. That's right. We have to entertain the people and talk about the pinball. Enough of the bullshit. That's right. We're a show. Pinball's way more important than that. All right. So let's get into it. Let's start by thanking our partners. Why don't we do that? Kevin, it's all you this time. It's me? Okay. I'll let you do the next part. We got something special coming up. I'll do the next part. Yep. Some of you folks in chat are keyed into what's going on. But thank you to our partners, our premium partner, pin stadium lights visit pin stadium.com and use coupon code buffalo to save 10 on all the best lighting kits for your pinball machines app control for android and ios uh does a great job lighting up the entire play field again that's pin stadium.com more to come from them though so stick around uh pinside.com if you want to go talk about pinball uh review your latest games uh complain about the top 100 and how it's not accurate go to pinside.com uh comment pinball Light up all your inserts, all your GI, make it look amazing with brand new LED lights from Komet Pinball. Flip it out. If you want to buy a new pinball machine, you can get almost all of them from flipping out pinball. Flip it out. Flip N out. The letter N out. Pinball.com. Spinnerspinball.org if you want to support the great charity, our longtime friend Joe Saeed and his excellent work with Spinners Pinball. You can do that at spinnerspinball.org. if you need new pinball rubbers visit titanpinball.com use coupon code buffalo to save 10% on your competition rings you can also get yourself one of these amazing titan mats if you got a hard floor in your game room and you're a middle aged man like me and it hurts to stand on hard floors get yourself a titan mat multimorphic.com and jerseyjackpinball.com makers of amazing pinball machines check them out at multimorphic.com and jerseyjackpinball.com. Nick, tell us what else we got coming out from Penn Stadium, though. All right, here's the deal for people who skip out on, you know, when we read our partners and stuff. Well, this is where you lose out. This is also where you lose out if you don't watch us live. So one thing I wanted to do is certainly reward the folks who tune in to our live podcast. I think that's awesome. I love seeing the chat. I read it all, even the bad comments. So, as many of you know, Penn Stadium is our premier partner, and they've done... Oh, Nick, we lost you. Rip. ...been neglecting our podcast, which gets even more viewers. So, reached out to Scott and said, hey, do you want to do a giveaway for the brochure? And, of course, Scott said yes, because Scott's awesome, and he's been great to work with all the way back since 2017. So Scott said that we can give away a set of, let me get this right, because this is a new product for me. These are the Neo X panels valued at $500. They are for the music pins from Stern. So Foo Fighters, Rush, Led Zeppelin. And as you guys know that Stern has built into like the recess of the cabinet spots to put their lighting kits. So if you don't have a lighting kit from Stern, well, Penn Stadium has you covered. And he's doing a limited edition run. There's only 100 units that he's doing for this run. So here's a chance to win one of those units today. Kevin, before I go into the description of this, how do they enter in chat? So just type. So we're streaming on YouTube as well for the first time for the bro show. So hello to all our YouTube viewers. Twitch said we can stream on YouTube and Twitch at the same time now. So we're doing that. But if you're watching on YouTube, you can't enter. You've got to jump over to the Buffalo Pinball Twitch chat, type hashtag win, and that will get you in. And so we've got it. I can show you right here. We have 11 entries right now, 12 entries. It's going in. So at some point during the show, we're going to pull from Moobot. He's going to pick who the winner is, and then whoever he picks will get a set of these Penn Stadium Neo X panels. So I'll do a little overview of what these are, and then we'll pull this later on today. And we will try to do more giveaways on our live podcast, so definitely want to take care of our partners and also take care of our fans. So there's two additions to these. He's giving away the cover band edition, and I'm just going to read what he has here. Experience pinball like never before with a cover band edition of Neo X Panels. These incredible panels deliver insane play field and side cabinet wall illumination. I'm just going to have my own edit there. I believe Scott. That is insane illumination. He does not mess around. Replacing factory lighting if you have it. Get ready to witness your pinball machine in a whole new light as Neo X Panels outperform leaps and bounds. And then there's a concert edition, which we're not giving away, but you can get. for the true rock stars of pinball, the Concert Edition is the way to go. This version not only provides multicolored flashers and multiple trigger points inspired by the legendary Neo Fusion Adams Orion's Belt, but also works with all models, Pro, Premium, and Limited Edition versions of Stern Led Zeppelin, Rush, and Foo Fighters. Whether you already have factory lighting or not, the Concert Edition will fulfill your wildest pinball dreams. For more information, you can reach out to Scott about them. He's got the website and and as i think kyle bossa pointed out in chat stern is so slow in releasing these kits if you've been waiting on the sidelines and you want something that's even more powerful than what stern may eventually release you can satisfy your your desire today so check it out and we'll we'll pull that at some point later today so anybody who trickles in uh maybe they get a chance to enter as well all right let's uh let's let's go let's let's jump into things let's do some news tell us about it tim here's the tip it's the latest pinball news so hot it's on fire all right it's uh you know we have the new pinball machine extravaganza at the beginning of the year where everybody decided to reveal all their games at the same time we had like a mini version of that uh in the lead into expo uh the first one that came out like right after our last podcast was uh labyrinth so let's jump over there and we can show you a little bit about labyrinth thanks to pinball news for for the pictures that we're showing you here but this is from a brand new pinball company called barrels of fun they're they've revealed their launch game based on the jim henson movie labyrinth so um yeah if you if you're an 80s kid you might remember this movie um so this is a new company they're based in houston texas texas becoming the new hub of all the pinball stuff i guess so uh chicago south for as far as pinball is concerned uh it was established by David David Van Es, who worked for Spooky Pinball for seven years designing games, and is the new company CEO and game designer. Brian Savage, who is in charge of manufacturing Hasbro action figures, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. So he's part of the team, too. Also on the team are art director Johnny Frazier-Allen, Robert Blakeman Doomsnill, who looks after the marketing graphics, Phil Grimaldi, who makes rules alongside Bo and Karen's, and designed rule sets for Spooky Pinball and multimorphic and motion graphic artist Trent Armstrong. So on the software side, they have Eric Preefke, who used to work for Spooky, David Fawcett. So a lot of folks who have touched pinball in other areas of the manufacturing industry but really coming together for a brand-new game. The price is $10,600, and they are doing 1,100 units. they had an allotment of these that they were selling directly I think it was like 100 or 150 of them those have sold out, all the direct ones but you can still get your own Labyrinth via a distributor and I'll say it looks pretty fun what was your first impression when you first saw Labyrinth? I'm going to approach this in a couple ways because we talk a lot about the pinball business and how you release a game so we should definitely talk about that But I'll just talk about the impression of the game and what, you know, impression of the game means, like, the artwork, the layout, whatever toys are in there. And I got to say, like, I was impressed with it. I think this is a good showing. This looks like it could be, you know, an American pinball game or a Stern game. Maybe not Jersey Jack up to that quality 100%, but that's not even a knock. I mean, it's close. It's like this looks like a legit pinball company has made a game. It's a great debut from a new pinball company. So first impressions look good. Theme does absolutely nothing for me. I've never seen Labyrinth. I don't have that nostalgia. And it looks kind of like a weird thing to put in my basement. But we could talk about the business approach, and I think we should do that. But, again, first impression is certainly good. This doesn't appeal to me at all, but, you know, I think it's overall kind of stepping outside of myself and what I look for in a pinball machine. I think it's a good impression. Yeah, I'll just give my first impressions, too. One thing I forgot to mention was that Jonathan Bertrand, Jonathan Bergeron, was the artist. So he did Final Resistance and Jurassic Park from Stern. So he did a really cool job on the art, I think. But, yeah, I think I had a more favorable first impression. Like, I remember the movie. I couldn't remember if I had actually seen it, but my wife always spoke favorably of this movie. It was one of her favorite movies in the 80s. and like it's a Jim Henson thing so it's got more of a fantasy feel to it and that comes across in the overall look and feel of the game the little teaser video they put out did a good job of showing some of the play field interactions I thought mechanically it was interesting it did some cool stuff like on the left orbit I don't know if it's the left orbit or it might be even under that ramp the ramp moves up and can capture the ball and then you can hit the ball out of there um so it's doing some some interesting things mechanically that i was like oh that's kind of cool um and yeah overall it was so it was first impressions were good like they and we'll get into this and i guess i'll i think i know where you're going with like the business of it but it's like okay they didn't say we're we're gonna uh open pre-orders for this theme that we have and then you know two years down the line maybe maybe you'll see it no they they did what we always kind of encourage companies to do it's like build a game put them in boxes and charge money for it in exchange for product once i'm able to play it you know what i mean it's a crazy concept but they're it seems like they're doing it right would you agree with that yeah if i had to rate the company in terms of debuting it's kind of like a 10 out of a 10 right they've they've We've spent a lot of time in this show kind of just talking about, making fun of, criticizing a lot of upstarts in all their comical missteps from Deep Root to, I forget that, what's that Australian? Oh, Ballarama. Ballarama, right? Like missteps from American Pinball and stuff. And it's like this company has done everything right. And let's talk about that. One, I didn't even know that there was another company set to take the stage until they made their announcement. And when they made their announcement, they had a game ready to show. They had video. They had a tutorial. The video was good. And they picked a licensed theme. And they're ready to, for people who are excited and can't help themselves and emotionally are willing to dive into an unproven company in a game they haven't even played, to take money from those people and ship them games, that's a 10 out of 10. Like, you crushed it. I mean, the tutorial video could have been better quality, but I'll give them a pass on that because they've done so many right things. That is how anybody who is crazy enough to launch a pinball company, look what they did because they did a fantastic job. That is how you do it. That gives me a lot of confidence in this company because, first of all, this stuff is super basic. But the fact that they can at least, but so many people get tripped up, the fact that they can do that and pull it off and do that right, rather than sponsoring events and tournaments and hyping up their own bullshit, they waited until they had a product, they waited until it was ready, they're ready to announce it, and they can take money and ship it. Fantastic. Good job. I can't wait to see where this company goes and what they do, and I think we've learned that. I don't know if you mentioned this, Kevin, but they've sold 550 units already. That's really impressive. First of all, Buffalo Pinball never endorses just buying a game from a new company that you haven't played and hasn't had a proven track record. I get it if it's limited and you're worried about getting it. It remains to be seen how the game plays, how the code is, how the quality is. But first steps, first initial steps that need to be taken from a new company, very good. So congrats to them. And also there's notable people involved in this project, like Bowens doing the rules. I know Phil Grimaldi is involved. He's been on the tournament scene forever. I remember him when I started playing in tournaments more than 10 years ago. Sounds like this team knows what they're doing. Yeah, and you say it's basic stuff, but it's also really hard to do all of this and get all of it. Think about how much money you have to have invested to get to this point, to have a game developed, art, assets, a license, all the parts, without having taken any money, and then have them ready to go. So it seems easy. It seems like a no-brainer. But it's definitely not easy to pull off, I would say. Otherwise, everybody would do it this way, right? Because you have to have so many of your ducks in a row, so many areas of expertise covered to get to this point. So kudos to them. I will say, you know, and like, and they did the right thing by grabbing a license, right? So you look at this versus something like Ninja Eclipse, which we'll talk about later, which is a mess for so many reasons, but just right off the bat, at least you have, it's like Jim Henson. Everybody knows the Muppets and Jim Henson, right? And this is a theme from the 80s. So it's in that the area of nostalgia for the folks that happen to be buying pinball machines right now. So it might not be something that appeals to everybody's nostalgia, but it's going to hit some people. Right. So you're going to get people who are like, yes, to send you my money now because I love this theme. Right. Which you're never going to get with an original theme, no matter what it is. And then on top of that, you know, so it's and it's not like an A plus theme. Maybe it's like a B theme. But I think, you know, for your first game, it's a smart thing to do. right dude this is time and time again i don't know who needs to hear this american pinball i'm looking at you but this is a brand new company okay there's i know they had some of the games right at pinball expo so some people got to play it in person but a lot of people who ordered this ordered it probably just after seeing the trailer most of the people who ordered this have not played this game and yet 550 people plus ordered this right so that's more people by almost like not not 10 times, but probably 5X galactic tank force. And why? Because of theme. Because of theme. This is so easy. This business is super complicated in many ways from a manufacturing perspective, and yet it's super fucking easy in some ways. And that's just called getting a license. And I don't even think Labyrinth is an amazing license by any way, shape, or form. And yet it's still amazing enough that 550 people, most of which have not played a game, just fork over like $10,000 in an economy that's not great right now. So, again, I talk about this every time. I don't know how much evidence people need, but we have to keep on talking about it because some people are confused and some companies are trying to go out of business by this confusion. Yeah, like you said, people just got their walls out and threw $10,000 at a brand new company with zero reputation aside from the people who are on the team. But they have no history of building machines, software, code, all that stuff. As their own unit, they've all done things on their own. But yeah, to get 500 people to jump out and do that, that's amazing. uh one thing i i will you know since goran left us without a topper talk yet again this month uh let's let's at least show the topper because look at that topper that's a topper there's no booty rate there's no uh led strips lighting up plastics it's uh it looks amazing uh sculpted uh dudes that their eyes light up and i think the guys on the side their heads move and stuff um nice job the shooter rides a little much but you know uh the topper is good Wildcat is waiting for he's holding out for Muppet Baby's pinball machine though maybe soon maybe next people keep saying Muppets we're running out of themes so we're getting there I was talking to Jay that we're running out of music pin themes so maybe one day we'll see a Dave Matthews pinball machine just for Jay let me give a quick shout out we got a $10 donation super chat from James Garazza on YouTube he says I don't like the Labyrinth theme either to me the bigger point is that they did a fantastic job of delivering a game with world under glass. The look is better than any game in recent history. And yeah, it, it kind of harkens back to like wizard of Oz when that first came out. I think it's got that, that the world under glass full, like a fantasy theme kind of thing going underneath. So, so thank you for that. Yeah. And there you go. James is listening on a YouTube, which is awesome to see Kevin. Kevin made the technology happen. So you can listen on Twitch, YouTube, whatever your preferred platform is these days. Yeah. it's cool to be able to join folks, have folks join us live from YouTube. So that's cool. Um, all right. So the other, well, there's, there's other games to talk about, but the second big game that got revealed was Elton John. And a lot of folks, this was in the rumor mill for quite some time. So this is Steve Ritchie's first game from Jersey Jack pinball. Um, so it's coming out in two versions of platinum edition and a collector's edition. Platinum edition is priced at $12,000 while the collector's edition is 15. So those are the same prices as their last two games, but they used to be called LE and Collector's Edition, Limited Edition and Collector's Edition. They changed the Limited to Platinum for some reason. It seems like where, and we'll talk about this more later, like some prices are actually coming down. Instead of actually lowering prices, they just included more with the game to increase the quote-unquote value of the game. But a maximum of 1,000 Collector's Editions will be made. uh platinum edition is not limited in number so um so they they showed it off at expo people got to play it at expo it's got a bunch of songs from elton john himself he does some call outs on it um yeah so here here if you're watching the video you can take a look this is the platinum edition we're seeing here um so basically on a limited edition you would never get a topper uh now you get a topper um it's got um some like platinum coated armor i guess you would get uh powder coated armor on your on your previous games um oh and it comes with radcals that's another one of the one of the upgrades it's the super shiny uh uh decals on the sides of the cabinet um arts by Christopher Franchi uh layout by um Steve Ritchie like we said uh it's very reminiscent of Steve Ritchie games. It's got some, some other interesting feeds and things like that, but you know, it's your basic Steve Ritchie three flipper layout, two ramps, side ramp. I think, you know, Star Trek, um, even Led Zeppelin ish, I guess with a, with a little more going on in the back. Um, yeah, it got the scoop over on the far left You know it like it like greatest hits of Steve Ritchie which I feel like that the case with Steve Ritchie and with guys like Brian Eddy It's like you think of a certain style of game with those designers, and if they diverge from that, then it's like, well, what the heck? But then if they do the same thing they have been doing, then it's like, oh, it's the same thing we've been seeing. So it's, I don't know. Maybe they're at that point in their careers where it's like, all right. Time to try something new or pass the buck. I don't know. So what did you think of Elton John when you first saw it? Well, as you were scrolling through those pictures, I mean, I got a lot of thoughts, but as you're scrolling through those pictures, I just thought like that. I love the play field art. Cabinet's okay, but I got to say, Franchi might be my favorite artist. I think he's got a lot going on, but he doesn't overdo it. I sound like a broken record on that, but I think he crushed it. I think he did a good job. It's a very visually appealing pinball machine. I can't imagine how you could do much better than that. Yeah, I mean, it's a Steve Ritchie look. You're getting the same old, same old layout, which it is a great layout. I'm guessing it's a lot of fun. I've never wanted an Elton John-themed pinball machine. Never wanted that But music pins are generally fun So I bet it's a blast to play I think the one thing that's funny is that You know I see all these people crying about Elton John And what is Jersey Jack doing Making an Elton John It's like Elton John Dude I get that you don't like Elton John Like in the way that I don't want an Elton John pinball machine But you do realize that Everybody on this fucking planet pretty knows who Elton John is He's been around for decades one of the best selling artists of all time it makes sense as a theme as a business to pick Elton John right like it just makes total sense and it is I think maybe it was Levy in the comments on Pinside he's like this has got to be one of the most notable people to do pinball call outs at least in like a music themed pin so yeah I mean it's from a business standpoint I think it makes sense whether I want to see an Alan John pin or not is irrelevant. I think the success of this pin is just, and we can talk about this later, Kevin, if you want to do it on the price segment, but I think it's just a terrible time to be releasing a pinball machine. And I think that Jersey Jack pinball machines are just at a level of cost where it's just a bridge too far for many people that maybe this is not a theme for the pinball community per se, but maybe they just do, you know, the Richie Riches, who maybe this is their first game that they get, and they might have an Elton John pinball machine. Maybe that's their audience. So we'll never see this represented on pin side, really, in the true amount of games that are sold. But, I don't know, that's my thought. It's not a game that I'm planning on getting just because of where the market is, cost of pinball right now. And Elton John doesn't do anything for me, even though I obviously respect his career, and I'm sure it's a lot of fun. But, you know, maybe I'll play one and fall in love with it and can't help myself. But there it is. There's my impressions. Yeah, I think what's cool is that we're to the point, again, where you don't have to blindly buy pinball machines, right? Things have cooled off. You can play the game. And then if you like it, go out and buy it, right? And you're not going to have to wait three years to get your machine. So, you know, find a friend that's got one of these. Go check out one in an arcade if you got one nearby. If you love it, then you can put your money down. But if not, you know, buy something else or, you know, get it secondhand. That's the thing, too. Like, you know, again, we're to the point where, you know, if you open a pinball machine, it doesn't go up in value. It's going down, right? And we'll talk about this more later, but Insert has lowered the prices of their MSRP on some games. so you've got the luxury of taking your foot off the the buying accelerator a little bit checking out the game if you like it then you buy it um and maybe without jumping right in because before you could pretty much buy whatever and not lose any money on it so it didn't really matter if you uh if you bought it and didn't like it you just turn around and sell it uh where the market is right now you're gonna want to you know want to chill out a little bit i think so um that is Elton John. We'll see more about that. So this was a little bit of a change from how JJP has rolled out their recent games with Toy Story and Godfather and Guns and Roses. They all had them ready to go. This one they announced probably because they wanted to show it off at Expo. And now they're actually going to start building them in November. So a little bit of it. They didn't have them in box ready to ship like they had for the past few releases, but they weren't too far behind so you should be start seeing these out and about pretty soon all right uh another uh announcement at expo not a new game but uh an upgrade of a game and and a change in price is uh pinball brothers uh revealed art uh sculpts in price of their new alien ellen ripley edition so they have a ripley version is what they call it um what's cool is a couple cool things about this It's got Lior, the Art of Pinball, a friend of the channel, a friend of the show. He does amazing work. We've talked about his mods before. His sculpts are now, like, officially part of this game. So he's partnered with Pinball Brothers and with Dutch Pinball, and his art and his sculpts are actually going to be in these games. So he's got the screen surround, the mini screen surround, the Xeno head and the apron are all from Lior and the Art of Pinball. The price actually dropped, which was amazing, to $79.95. I think the other was $8,500, I think, for the standard version. So you got better sculpts. The price went down. Pre-orders are open now with distributors. Game's scheduled to ship mid-November, so pretty soon. And we can show you some of the art. It's got a new art package, too, which looks pretty cool. I saw some folks saying, well, it doesn't look like Alien, which I'm not an Alien diehard, so that doesn't bother me. I just think it looks really cool and I would like to have this art package in my game room. So to me, that's a win. Um, it's got to me, the, the other alien, the, the like standard is just kind of like plain. This one actually looks pretty cool. And I understand that's kind of like the depths of space and that's the design of alien, but for a pinball machine, I think this works. Um, the, yeah, part of, part of the upgrades is that it has a clips of Sigourney Weaver, Weaver and Ellen Ripley in it. And you can see her in the backbox. to, she's in the little mech thing, Battle of the Alien, but there are clips of her in the game. It says on the flyer, pending license approval. Yeah, they're pulling a 007 here where they had clips of her in the games that they were showing off at Expo, but they have to get the okay from, I guess Disney owns this movie now? I can't keep track, but whoever owns the movie now has to give the final okay still. but um uh yeah so there's we're the caution when we talk about that exactly um and the surround i think that looks really cool and i guess they actually redid the um video graphics to to match the the display around this so that that's cool too and then they have the upgraded custom apron which is nice i actually like the one apron that patrick has on his which has the led lights in the apron to kind of light up the play field too that one's nice so um but this is this is cool for an upgrade from the factory so there you go check out um pinball brothers for their new alien um stern just keeps on rolling well did you have any thoughts on that or you want to go into the next thing uh we can go on to the next thing you know i'm always skeptical the quality of these games but i again i i haven't spent much time really diving into them so i don't want to i don't have strong thoughts yeah the the general consensus i've got is that like the the first ones that pinball brothers made were a big mess tons of problems and uh james had a bunch of problems with him i don't i think i don't know if patrick has had problems with his um but uh it seems like they've gotten better over time so hopefully that's true um uh the other so jumping into stern let's talk about stern uh they just keep on rolling these remakes out man so uh after what did they do they did Jurassic Park there was another one that the Stranger Things that's the one that that guy went off about last month on Pinzide they're bringing back Elvira for like the fifth time so if you didn't get an Elvira and you want one there's another way to get one it's the Blood Red Kiss Edition this is their new thing that they were showing off at Expo limited to 500 units priced at $13,000 yeah so basically same game different art it's got uh a black and red black gray and red feel to it uh it looks looks really cool i think but uh it's just like they just keep going back to the well on this one it's uh and it's got this ridiculous sword shooter ride here let me see if there's a close-up of it here oh yeah there it is like tell me you're not gonna break that off by running into it look at that thing it's insane um yeah yeah it's just fucking silly you know it's not for me i'll just put it that way it's it's definitely for some people but not for me yeah i know you love your pinball machine you want to do everything to it but sometimes it doesn't make sense yeah like this looks really cool though i think like it's got vibes of like centaur or something you know when you think when you look at it um but yeah uh thirteen thousand dollar limited to 500 signed by alvira i think i don't know um there's there's the oh here it is uh here's the official bullet points from the flyer custom alvira dagger shooter knob uh exclusive autographed blood red kiss edition signature card by alvira alvira mistress of the dark uh unliving black and white printed graphics with red sparkle enhancements including the mirrored backlash equipped with the award-winning insider connected that's my favorite award-winning dude it's our connected i'm have i talked about this before on the podcast i used to love it when they did the like every two week tournaments and then they stopped yeah they turned it into this uh have i talked about this on the podcast go for it all right so it really is baffling like i was like a huge advocate of like stern insider connected every two weeks they would do a different tournament and like i was glad buying games and i was seeing that on there and i can compete now like look this is not a made this is not an official tournament people can do things to the games but it's still fun to chase the leaderboard and like have high scores As gamers, like a high score table, I can compete against everybody, blah, blah, blah, even though you don't take it super seriously. And they stopped doing that this year. I had no idea why. For the longest time, they were just like doing, oh, play Foo Fighters on a certain date if it's in the city. Like what? Why can't you do that and then also continue to do the thing? And I asked Zach Sharp. I reached out to him. I was like, dude, I love this thing. Why are you not doing it? I'm not even sure. I didn't get a great answer why. why I don't think he handles that. But Stern, you're making a huge mistake. I don't understand it. Unless I'm just weird and I'm one of the only few people that like those tournaments, but there's no cost to you really to do it. Why are you not doing it? I was playing my games a lot more when I had a game, and I was definitely more excited to own a Stern game that had that feature. I think you guys are dropping the ball big time. Yeah, the badges. The stupid badges. Arcade Hunter says they seem more help than on the badges. Okay, fine. I understand achievements or badges or whatever you want to call it, they do appeal to certain people, but why does it have to be an either or? It should be an and. Have that and the high score. I don't get it. If somebody from Stern wants to let me know, and I'll mention the next podcast, fine, but I think you're messing up big time. Why not both? You know what I mean? That's what I say. Why not both? Yeah, because the badges are like, I don't know, they're like participation awards. You turn on your game and scan the thing and you get it. You don't even have to do anything. It's like, oh, it's Godzilla Day. You can get a badge. It's like, who cares? Who cares? Well, Blue Detroit Blue says, why not neither? I mean, it's an optional thing. So it doesn't hurt you being there. That makes no sense, dude. It doesn't hurt you being there. You don't have to do it. If you get a badge accidentally, nothing bad will happen to you, I promise. You can take it out of your game and cover it up. Don't even use it. Or just don't connect your game to the internet. Then you don't have to worry about it. But it is nice to have the downloadable software update. So I'll give them that. Good job, Stern. They didn't hear him physically. I'm sorry. So that's their new latest thing. I think they're running those already. The other interesting thing that came out of Stern, that's not what I want, is that they have dropped the MSRP for pricing on certain games. So this popped up on Pinside about 15 days ago. Led Zeppelin Pro and Premium and Turtles Premium have all dropped in price. So I think it was $1,000 on the Pros. I forget what the overall price was. Oh, here it is. $1,000 on Zeppelin Pro and $2,000 off on Zeppelin Premium and Ninja Turtles Premium. So that speaks to what we were talking about earlier, is that the market has cooled off significantly to the point where vendors are just sitting on these games. And they're like, we need to make room in our warehouses. We need to sell off some of this inventory so we can buy your new games. So Stern is probably like, oh, finally, we'll let you lower the price on these a little bit. it'll be interesting to see if they actually lower the price of their new games i would say that's highly unlikely uh not unprecedented but rarely do things go down in price right but i guess if if the market if the demand goes down so much that they've they're gonna have to find some way to bring the price down on these new games so um i heard there was speculation that rush was in the mix on this too but i haven't seen it in any of the promotional images or anything like that the other interesting thing is that they dropped the price on their home pins um those are down to between 3300 to 3600 i think there were more like 40 4 000 to 4500 before so uh well we wouldn't encourage you to buy a home pin they uh um you know you pay less if you want one you pay less for it now and let's let's talk about this and put it in perspective first of all i i feel for all the distributors who have these games and they can't sell them and uh somebody can correct me if i'm wrong but distributors can't lower the price on games like they have to like so if you're a distributor you bought x amount of games and you can't sell them because you're you're you're stuck with that price. Now, look, they do some deals, trust me, but they can't go out and say, oh, I've got X amount of Led Zeppelins and they're new in box because I can't sell them and I need to move it so I can bring in new inventory for the newest games. We're going to sell it for $6,000. They can't do that. They can't publicly do that. So that sucks for them, and I feel for them. Now, to put this in even more perspective, when these games came out, that's the price that they came out as. So Stern just put them back to... Stern jacked up the price on those after a while. And I'm not talking about new games. Like when Bond debuted, Bond was like $9,600 for a premium. When Led Zeppelin debuted, it was like $7,600 for a premium. And then they jacked it up when they jacked up the prices on all the new games that came out. So Stern is just putting it back to what it was when it came out. Now the other layer of thinking that you've got to do with this. So I got my Led Zeppelin premium in July of 2021. It's only a couple years ago. And the price of that when I got it was, MSRP was like $7,600. Now, $7,600 today in buying power is $8,500. So you got to do that math as well. So it's at the price that Stern's charging it in today's dollars because of inflation, is actually cheaper than it was at that price two years ago. So keep that in mind. All right? You've got to kind of do these stunts and do these things in your mind. And then same with, you know, I love pricing discussions because people just have no fucking clue how things work. But, like, you look at Guns N' Roses. When Guns N' Roses came out, Kevin, in September of 2020 when they did the stream and revealed you can get it for $9,500, is that correct? That's right. So, okay, $9,500 today versus what $9,500 would buy you in 2020 is really $11,200 today. Okay, that gives you a perspective. Like, yes, so it's not the $12,500. Jersey Jack is still charging $1,000, roughly $300 more. But it's not night and day, right? You've got to do this. You've got to do this. And this is the, I'm just using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator. That's from the government. The government's full of shit in terms of what things actually cost. So just put everything in perspective on these prices when you do this in terms of talking about the market and where prices are today and where the market's at. It's a screwy fucking economy we live in, so it's not an easy game to play when you're trying to value these things. Yeah, it's tough, man. But yeah, if it comes down to people aren't buying it at the current price, you've got to meet them where they're willing to buy it. So, and I did see, I did see some folks jumping in at those prices. So, and it's funny too, that like, like we've become conditioned to think that the higher prices is the new normal. And then when it comes up, it goes back to the old price. We're like, Oh, what a deal. You know what I mean? So, uh, they, it's kind of like, you know, you, you end up convincing yourself. Well, like our friend James had that Venom LE that he was selling for less than 10 grand. And it's like, Oh, that's, that's a good deal. I should grab that. I think our friend Drew from Canada might be buying it. I heard that. Yeah, James texted me about that. By the way, speaking of, I mean, God, I should use this fucking platform a little more often. Just to let you know where prices are. So we had a location that we pulled some pinball machines out. So they don't have a home for them necessarily without trying too hard. So it's a Mandalorian. It has like 3,000 plays on it. Game looks great, by the way, because I always clean it. It's working great. I started off, I think, pricing it at $6,000 and just seeing if I, you know, giving myself some wiggle room. I have it currently priced at $5,200. And I had somebody reach out and say about, they didn't even talk price, like, would you really be willing to ship? I don't want to ship. Fuck that. I've not even had anybody lowball me or offer me. Like, I cannot sell this pinball machine. That is letting you know where prices are. So I'm going to, I haven't put it up yet. my rock bottom pricing is $4,800 $4,800, if I can't sell that pinball machine for $4,800 I'm going to fucking put it in my kitchen because that is a sickening price, so if somebody wants that game for $4,800 reach out to me somehow, some way it's yours, I'm not going any lower I don't want a fucking trade I don't want your stupid other game that you're buying, just cash on the table let's go, let's sell this game $4,800 Mandalorian Pro lightly routed great shape come and get it what if i have like an old jet ski and a a freezer full of uh soda yeah would you trade for that i'm open to interesting trades coven you know it's fucking fucking hell i've seen people offer some dumb crap so uh of course that's coming that's coming all right uh all right so that's that's pricing um multimorphic put out an update this came out by email and Kevin I'm going to just I want to talk about Multimorphic when I get back but keep on going I'm going to go perfect bathroom break for Nick I'll be right back. Nick's going to the bathroom during the Multimorphic update alright here we go so basically every quarter-ish Jerry from Multimorphic puts out an update status update on where things are he sends this as an email to customers and folks who have ever who have asked to be on the list. So I won't read it all because it is pretty long, but to give you kind of the cliff notes of it over the last year and a half, they've built up to their maximum capacity at their facility in round rock. They're now building 10 new P3 machines every week. So they brought the lead time down on P3 orders to about four to six weeks. So, you know, for a while it was like, Oh, if I order a P3, you can't get it for a year. That's come way down. So if you were to say you can have it within a month or two months, pretty much. So but they do anticipate that going back up when they announce their next games, which one of one of the spicy nuggets they dropped in here is that they have three licensed games that they working on So if one of those comes out and it a dream theme that people want that that way time going to go back up Right Um so final resistance uh, the queue for people who have only ordered the kit, uh, that's about four months. So, um, so they have two separate lines. Basically one is for building brand new P threes. The other one is building modules. Um, so it's four months to get your module on final resistance, which pretty reasonable. Um, they, are addressing some of the early feedback and issues with final resistance they're going to send out a stronger drop target assembly and center wire forms to all owners they're also they actually released this a software update to adjust the default strengths of those coils and i have noticed that things have been working better since they put that out too so those are going to be sent out to final resistance customers free of charge they're also stepping back and they're going to look at their overall business um and they're they're um going to re-evaluate some of their choices as far as like manufacturing uh reliability and things like that because even though they do have really good support and what i would say the best support in the industry especially now that they've brought Nicholas Baldridge on board um they're stepping back they want they want to have people to have to rely on that support less right saying that's a smart thing um so basically as a result they were they had been planning on releasing a second full module this year uh that's been paused for the time being while i work out some of these issues that they had in manufacturing and uh they they've uh jerry in a follow-up message said they're not going to do any more uh any more uh servos on their their play through modules which hooray i'm happy to hear that too so um so let's see what was the other thing um basically yeah three licensed modules a couple other games came out recently which we talked about on the last uh last show and i think that's pretty much it nick did you have some thoughts you wanted to share on that yeah yeah yeah i so i i i liked playing uh final resistance even though i didn't have much time on it the game looks fun and i uh and one of my favorite games on the p3 is steven uh what is it nick ball rich's game the uh um the dracula game whatever drained yeah drained i like i like i like drained is because i'm like it's got a classic feel um i don't know i i found myself addicted to that game so um shout out to what p3 is doing i could be in i i might be a p3 owner by 2030 i'm gonna give it that time between now and 2030 there's a chance i think it's it's conditional on having a walk-in basement in like a custom home sometimes so that's there's no way in god's green earth i'm gonna buy one now oh yeah there's There's no way we would get into your basement. No, no, no. But you also got to play Birdwatcher, and you were pretty hyped about that, right? Yeah, I liked Ian's Birdwatcher. That dungeon game was fun, too, and addicting. I liked that a lot. Yeah, that's one of the things I like about P3 is that they can take risks with different styles of pinball, right? Something that you would never sell as a full pinball machine. You can put out as a couple hundred dollar add-on game and just enjoy it, right? What was the dungeon game? Dungeon Door Defender. That's a smart game. Yeah, that's cool. Here's a stream you did with a very handsome guy. Well done. Cool game. Good job. I have to get my heist back from Matt so I can play the update. An update came out for this. Actually, there's another one. Who made that game? This is Michael Ocean. so he's actually a bit less brother yes he programmed uh weird al and final resistance but he released this on his own like it's his own third party game um he's got an update for that and also the software update came out for final resistance so we should do a bro show on that uh in the near future that'd be fun it's ready for prime time dave suza is volunteering to move into my basement. I ain't conscious. No. I've got many heavy things in my basement. No. Thank you, though. Dave's in full-on P3 show mode. All my friends have a P3. All my friends have one. I don't need one. What was awesome was the last league night, three of us P3 owners got together and we all swapped our modules. It was like the dream. Actually, one of the newer members in the league is like, this is the P3 dream. you guys are doing it so like i let my my heist out to matt and um patrick got drained and then uh somebody else uh dave got heist from patrick something like that uh but it's cool it's like what you would want to have it's like swapping nintendo games with your friends back in the day except for the big old big old module boxes is is a good time um uh yeah so there you go I shout out to Multimorphic. I think that's absolutely the right thing to do. They've reached this certain milestone in their, their company career, their trajectory, and they're, they're pausing and saying, Hey, let's, let's reevaluate things. How can we make the, our products even better? And a response to that was overwhelmingly positive from what I saw online, even though it means, you know, the next game is going to be a little bit later. I mean, the bottom line is there's still like what? Six, six modules out there right now. You can get plus all these add on games. there's tons of content to keep you busy in the meantime so um yeah keep it up and i've been playing i will talk about this in game room updates but i've been playing the crap out of final resistance i love it it's great all right we've been seeing a lot of you know very positive things about pinball companies and the new things but we can't avoid this one nick it's uh it's Turner Pinball and their pinball machine Ninja Eclipse, which got re-revealed at Pinball Expo so that we first saw it at Texas Pinball Festival earlier this year. And they've showed what their production games are going to look like except maybe they might be changing it again. Let's just scroll down to show you what it looks like because that's all anybody really cares about. Look at this thing. This is like a $10,000 pinball machine, just for the record. It's for the record. And this is what they're coming to market with. It's Ninja Eclipse. It's got this tiny little home pin-looking cabinet with no coin door. Apparently, if you're going to pay on location, you're going to use their app, which good luck. Fuck off. There you go. Nick summed it up. Look at that. Dude, I called it, on the Facebook post, I called it Zizzle Ellie. and a lot of people that resonated with them. That thing looks like a joke. God damn it. Dude, you're competing at the same price level as a labyrinth? This is a tale of two companies, right? This guy talks, brags, comes out with this thing. No notable names, no nothing. Knows better than everybody else, designs a pinball machine that looks different than every other pinball machine. And here's the deal, dude. You don't understand pinball whatsoever. You just don't. Pinball and pinball OCD, they want their pinball machines to look like their other pinball machines in their collection. You're not going to come up with a better design, and you didn't. Like, the odds of you coming up with a better design that, oh, this is so much better and smarter, you didn't do it. You didn't do it. You're not going to sell any of these. Like, I'm just sick and fucking tired of this. Anyways, whatever. Let him waste his time and money. Yeah, it's not a – so to take you back, this is the guy that used to work with Deep Root but doesn't want any association with Deep Root, but then he ended up and bought the Deep Root URL and launched his company on it. And then he's following that same trajectory of reinventing things that don't need to be reinvented, like the stupid glass. Look at this. So it's not even glass. It's polycarbonate, and it's got lights built into it, and you pull the whole thing off, and the ball trough is different. They reinvented this ball trough for some reason, and the way you open the cabinet is weird. all of this stuff. The word for that's over-engineered. The word for that's over... Look, this guy, technically probably smart, technically probably really fucking smart, needs to team up with somebody who has a business sense and a sense of who lives in the real world and understands marketing, understands what people want and don't want. You need to find that person, sir. If you want to make pinball machines, that's great. We want you in the industry doing stuff, but you got to have that yin to the yang. You got to work with somebody. You got to find another adult who's going to tell you no. Nobody's telling you no, sir, and that's the problem, and you will fail. I'm having some fun here, but it's true. It's true. Yeah, so there you go. If anybody gets that reference, that's a Curb Your Enthusiasm thing. I dig deep sometimes. They're making 100 of these, and yeah, they're like $10,000. Plus, they're making you pay $150, which is not refundable and also doesn't actually apply to the price of the game. What could go wrong? And you have to sign an NDA or some crap when you put your deposit on there. I don't know. Just don't. Everybody, just don't. Okay? Don't. Kevin, I got an important question to ask you. I'm going to ask you live, but you don't have to disclose this. Did you fulfill my merch request? No, I did not. Well, next time. All right. Next time. that like that the segue was going to be beautiful i know i know sorry i'm slagging all right all right it's okay you do a lot of good work yeah but we had to get here um i jumped over this but this is a milestone and this is a game that nixon on so maybe he can talk to talk a bit more about this but um pulp fiction finally hitting the production line so the first official pulp fiction pinball machine uh is rolling off the line at chicago gaming company aka the golden sample it's an important step towards mass production because it's the sample which all other production unions will be based upon um full production was delayed past the initially stated production estimate of q3 because play mechanics wanted to address several minor design issues during pinball show and location testing that they wanted to iron out to prior to shipping so kudos on them And not really a surprise because, you know, Play Mechanics, Raw Thrills, Pinball isn't their first. That's not their wheelhouse, right? This is basically the first pinball machine they're going to be making. So not a surprise that they're running into some things. Chicago Gaming, on the other hand, has made pinball machines, right? But they've been remaking old pinball machines. This is brand new, scaling up, spinning up production from a company that doesn't typically do this. So things are slowly progressing, but glad to see them taking steps in the right direction. This is still a game that I'm looking forward to. Nick, what do you think? Oh, I mean, I'm a buyer. I haven't paid for it yet or anything like that, but I definitely want it in my collection. I love what they're doing over there with it. It's too bad that it's just taking longer than they said. It sucks when you tease something, again, in March, and then you say you're going to have it by October. It's just way too long. We've played it, and it plays great. But at the same time, I can wait on the pinball machine, and I don't like to move pinball machines in the wintertime, and I'm happy to move a pinball machine in the spring or summer. So, yeah, good one eventually. Let's see them coming. All right, so now is the moment of truth, everybody. You've got, like, five seconds before I pull our winner. A hashtag win in chat. We have 42-ish entries right now, and we're going to go ahead and pull it. For the set of Pinstadium Neo X Panels, let's show those off again. Well, people get their last entries in. Pinstadium Neo X Panels, thanks again to Pinstadium. $500 value. This is the cover band edition, and this is perfect if you have a game from Stern, one of the games from Stern that has the expression lighting. Pop one of these bad boys in there instead. all right cuff all right here we go last entries are in we're gonna pick an entry joker pin we're gonna announce that in chat joker pin are you there do you accept let us know uh and then uh we'll get we'll connect you up with uh oh he's there oh there he is all right congratulations all right congratulations so basically we'll reach out to you via Twitch Whisper. We've got his consent. Yes, and we will get your email address, get that to Scott, and he will respond immediately because that's what he does. Scott's a robot. Maybe Scott has had open AI and he's been using it for years because his replies are on point. It feels that way, doesn't it? He's right on the ball. He's on it. Yep, smart guy. All right. So we finally got to play Venom. You ready to give some... But again, let's put the disclaimer on this. Impressions, not a review. Okay? Are we all on the same page? Yeah, so Kevin said, do you want to review Venom? I said, I can't because I've not played it enough, and I don't totally understand the game. So that's the quality from Buffalo Pinball. This is impressions. And I think, again, I love impressions because impressions matter. Some games knock it out of the park with impressions, and then maybe later disappoint, or their first impressions carry the day and it proves to be great. And then other times, first impressions are like, eh. And then you learn to love the game or the game develops into something special. So this is Impressions. Let's go. All right. So let's take a look over here. So we have only played the limited edition. I think that's true. So we have not played the pro. So all of the thoughts and everything that we're giving are on the limited edition model. uh and the pro my my takeaway is like if we had played the pro i think you know you can see where the the big differences would be on this game but um yeah venom it's the the latest brian Brian Eddy game we've talked about it a few times now finally got some on location around here our friend patrick picked one up as well uh which we went and played so we went to the launch party and played it there i camped out on it a bunch while nick was playing in finals and i i played like garbage that day so which meant i got a bunch of extra venom time um which i was okay with because it's a game i wanted to check out um it is brian eddy with uh zombie yeti art and dwight sullivan rules um i don't know do you want to go first what do you how should we yeah chop this up i'll dispute out so i've played it maybe 10 times the first time i played it was in a tournament and then I played it at our friend Patrick's house. So I played both LEs actually. First of all, good-looking game. Zombie Yeti artwork, you know, I've had my criticism of it, but I think this is where – this is like in his wheelhouse and it really caters to his art style. I think it looks beautiful. Busy as hell as always, but just I think it looks fantastic. So good choice. He's at least scaled it back and he's got the lanes that you're shooting for. Totally. And that's why I like it. It's more design for art, right? Yeah, you can see the shots. Yes, I think he's getting that. So, like, awesome. Perfect. See, a play field conveys a lot of information, right? You've got to read and look at the play field to try to understand what's going on. It helps you understand what's going on rather than running to the tilt forums. But when you just step up to a game, what am I supposed to be doing? Well, if the Playfield artwork is a jumbled mess, then that makes it a little more harder and less accessible. So it's pretty good. So visually, good. Maybe I just couldn't hear it well in both Patrick's and in the tournament we played in, but just seems not a lot of audio call-outs. It just seems very empty audio-wise. Like it's missing a lot. Not very atmospheric. music's fine whatever so I was definitely disappointed in that department Patrick says he thinks the game's like 60% done that's the one person's who owns the game's take on it I don't know if that's the case I think Kevin you and I were kind of like what the hell what the hell are we doing what the hell's going on so it wasn't an obvious thing to us and just kind of casually attacking the game the Venom toy that you hit that creeps up back there. I like that. I like visually seeing it get pushed back. That's cool. The bell tower is kind of easy to miss in there, and I kind of forgot it existed. The big thing about this game, I mean, first of all, this game is like a fan layout, which we've seen fan layouts a million times and doesn't do much for me these days. It's kind of uninteresting. But the thing that I think BrianNighty attempts to add and breathe life into a fan layout is a couple things. One, the play field, quote-unquote, changes. and I'm always a fan of that in general. You pick a different host, and physically some of the shots change. Now, I'll be honest with you, you can kind of see it happening, but when you're playing it, to me it doesn't feel like a major difference. It's not super noticeable. I'm like, whoa, this game just changed. It's not a night and day thing in the way that sometimes I think like when you have a like let's go big buck hunter and the buck comes out that changes the shots a lot when something's blocking it the shots are still where they are what where the shots go and what they do doesn't change a lot it's kind of like godfather like i think godfather is sort of the same way where a casual person might not even notice what's happening in the way the ball movement changes um so it's to give somebody an impression if you play godfather it's kind of like that it changes but it doesn't change it super radically although i i i like the idea in concept is it radical is it enough to move me into a game not really and then you've got the fast lock system which it's kind of cool but again like you're like you play it and it happens you're like so um the game is uh you know the game is kind of fast it's not fast like in the way that Black Knight is fast and brutal because it's like a safer game because the shots are way back there. So the ball kind of moves, the pace is kind of fast, but then it does a thing that I absolutely hate and it has a video mode in the game. And the video mode is so boring. I hate... I finally got to the point where I just hate, hate, hate video modes. It was a gimmick in the 90s. Some video modes are certainly better than others, but it doesn't do anything for the game. One could argue that Hey video mode might slow the game down Because the game's fast but it's not so fast like Johnny Mnemonic where you're like you need to catch your breath Fast so I think that's a Misstep on it Overall impressions is that there's nothing About this game where I walked away from And like man I really want to spend more time With it man I really want to own this game I'm not Like comic book games do nothing for me in general So that doesn't help but early Impressions are like I wouldn't say it's a bad game it's just like average forgettable doesn't do anything for me i think one of the one of the most interesting things i have going on here is the the insider connected like progression save thing where you level up your character and then as you level up your character i don't understand how it all works yet but um you know you get more you get stronger and you're able to battle the the bosses at a higher level and progress through the game and then you can unlock characters and things like that so i think all of that is cool uh based on where the software is right now i think it's got a long way to go like you said my my biggest thing it kind of worked two ways it kept me coming back to try to figure it out but it was also like what is happening in this game like wow how do i progress in this game where are the modes like i could start multi balls but it didn't feel like i was ever getting into modes until somebody told me oh you have to shoot these combos and then once you do three of those combos then you get to a battle and then you can stack in the multi balls and things like that and that's that's where it starts to get interesting right um but yeah the first like the overall structure i give them credit for trying something new it's not your basic you know five modes two multi balls kind of stern uh but you know it's not super obvious to somebody stepping up what's going on and how you progress through the game unless unless you got a buddy there that says oh do this and then it's and then when you stop step back and think about it's like duh i just shoot the same lit arrow you know i i follow that color around the play field okay that doesn't make sense but there's a lot of stuff lit and usually when you shoot the stuff that's lit stuff happens right so um and that's not always the case at least it didn't seem to be the case um but i i found it interesting i like superhero themes are are cool to me like the Marvel stuff. I like all that stuff. Comic books are cool. Venom is neat. I've been playing the new Spider-Man on PS5 and that's got some Venom stuff in it which makes this more interesting to me. So this is one I keep an eye on and if the software gets there I could see rotating a game in and out to play it or if it becomes one of those things where like i think the the safe progression is also a detriment because it lets you get to the end of the game and then once you get to the end of the game it's like do i feel like i've seen all there is to see and then we can move this game on so maybe it becomes more of a location game i don't know but it's hard to say when there's so much left to go yeah i i i don't totally know where i fall in on the progression thing i mean the progression thing does nothing for me personally. I like to earn something in a pinball machine in the traditional way of doing it in one go rather than like, this is literally a thing that if you play this thing enough you will get to see things. It's kind of, to me, that's unearned. It's just like, I'm going to hammer away and just by time I can see everything in there. Like, maybe that's great for a certain segment of the audience. I think it's geared way more for the casual person and that's totally fine. Like, as a Pinball company, yeah, you want to reach a market maybe that's not super nerds like us. But as a traditional pinball person, a person who wants to progress through something by earning it and getting better as a player and getting better as a machine and feeling a sense of accomplishment, that strips it of it. I can just kind of throw my time at it and just playing it enough and then finally just unlocking it through that and less skill level-wise is unappealing to me. And, again, it is once you beat a pinball machine, it kind of, what are you chasing at that point? That's, I don't know. So I don't know if this ends up being a good or bad thing. Somebody's probably going to point out you can shut that off in the settings. You don't have to play that way, and that's totally fine. So maybe on the whole, having that in there for people who want it is good, bad. It's just, it's sort of kind of like this neutral thing to me, right? Like it doesn't do anything. It doesn't appeal to me. Again, this game's not winning me over as a player. yeah it's uh like you know css in chat says you know play in certain mode you get what you want yeah and then you could always play at home and do that i guess the the progression thing like unlocking new characters makes it interesting but like if it was more than just seeing the whole game if there was something additional you get by progressing and saving through if it unveils more things that that become available as a player that would make it even more interesting But pinball companies are in this weird spot, and I think you're seeing it with where Stern in particular are adding these modes where you can play the wizard mode on its own. But most people, they put all this time and effort into these wizard modes that people never see, right? Like 90, 95% of people are never going to see. So making that accessible to people who are casual players, who just have games in their homes and want to just chill and do whatever. I think it's interesting to make like I want to see what everything is in the game maybe you and I want to see it the old fashioned way and plowing through a whole game and having the game of your lifetime and getting there where other people are like well I'm never going to get there so at least let me play it because I paid $10,000 for the spin ball machine so I want to see the wizard mode I like the idea of making it it's own separate challenge thing too that's kind of cool So, you know, they're trying different things, which, you know, maybe it's going to work out. Maybe it'll be a detriment, but we'll see. I appreciate that they're trying some different things. I didn't find any of the shots interesting or exciting. Yeah. It was just pretty, like, eh, pretty boring, pretty wallpaper. Like, I think of, like, Stern's Bond, and I like that layout pretty much. I thought shots are more interesting shots, more exciting. you know the rules and everything else is a different story but i'm just kind of contrasting these two things i mean that's the problem with fan games they're just like man been there been there done that yeah for sure all right well that's our venom impressions did we have anything else we wanted to go oh yeah let's do uh let's do some uh some game room updates so let's start out by by what pinball machine have you been playing the most in your game room this month Oh, God. I've not been playing a pinball machine much. I brought my Big Buck Hunter Reloaded arcade game back online because, you know, I've got to pay a $40 a month subscription. I hate that. It's ridiculous and it's painful. But if I want to have all the content and also compete on the leaderboards, I need to do that. So I brought it back online. Have not been playing much pinball. But, you know, we went out to that tournament thanks to Kevin. It was in my radar. And I managed to pat on my back. I managed to win that tournament. So that was cool because I don't get a chance to play in tournaments as much as I used to. So still got it, baby. That was awesome. Yeah, it was fun to get out and play a little bit. Dude, we crushed it. You won their tournament. We went out to Rochester back in the spring. And then I came and, you know, boom. Thanks for the wins. We'll take your Whopper points and go home. Uh, yeah, the, uh, so I've been final, I mentioned it earlier. Final resistance is what I've been playing, which, you know, it's the newest game in my collection. So not a huge surprise, but it's just super fun. I think there's something about, I feel like I'm a little burnt out on the super deep rule set games lately. And final resistance takes a little bit of a step back from that. There's still a ton to do. And there's like all these modes and battles and stuff you could do, but the framework is a little more straightforward and it's not, I don't know there's just something more pure about the style of gameplay that it is it's more of an ass kicker game it's not a long player unless you really get dialed in so I appreciate that and I just like the overall aesthetic of it is really cool that cyberpunk kind of feel is like something that really appeals to me so super stoked on Final Resistance and looking forward to playing that on bro with the new software update here in the near future and letting you dig into it a little bit too dude our friend joe cheravino says we should come to the ontario open multi-day tournament and i would love to but the timing is terrible because that's the day after like thanksgiving and you know it's tough around then it's like kind of family time for me i would love to it's a tough weekend you guys in toronto i love you guys but you have a bunch of like tournaments on like like i know that's not on thursday but you have like thursday friday instead of the weekend so yeah i saw that and i was excited because it was basically what we were talking about when we went up there in december it was like a multi-day tournament different spots uh tons of turning uh tons of water points they have but yeah just the the time of the year is not good for us unfortunately skip the turkey no way how dare you how dare you it's like he's not even american or something get out of here joe we have this mug i have to give you one of these years too it's been sitting here waiting for you we just haven't seen each other dude joe when are you gonna but i know i had to say conversation when are you gonna come down to buffalo we're gonna watch uh the fugitive in 4k that's coming out in 4k we're gonna talk about 4k stuff but uh let's make it happen yeah so uh um i game room updates wise mostly i've been playing when i'm not playing final resistance i'm playing spider-man on the ps5 it's incredible i love those games um just the whole you know the it's an open world game where you get to just basically fly around New York city and, and swing from the buildings and do crazy stuff and, and, and battle people. So if that seems like something that's up your alley, you probably already have it because it's sold a ton of copies, but, uh, highly recommend that game. And the other thing that Nick and I have both been getting into, like unknowingly, we both started getting into it, but, uh, we're, we're going old school and getting into our physical media for 4k blu-rays. Um, Well, you upgraded your projector. That's what prompted you, right? Yeah, I finally upgraded my projector to 4K, which was long overdue, long overdue. But I've been enjoying 4K movies. I got a pretty nice home theater system in my living room. And I love watching movies and been buying a lot of 4K things and watching them. Not to go off the pinball thing, but in terms of game room entertainment, watching an old movie that's been transferred to 4K is amazing. Those movies benefit more than any other movie. It's been a lot of fun. Also, shout out to Todd Anderson, who always is there to help me if I have a home theater question. He's a viewer listener. He's got a website called AV Nirvana, so check that out. He's been a good guy for many years. And I just got, so if you're watching or listening live or recently after we put this out, Best Buy has a bunch of 4K Blu-rays on sale for Black Friday, so you can go grab some stuff I got. Yeah, they're not selling physical media anymore. Yeah. Best Buy. I know. You can get them online. I got both Top Guns for like $10 each pretty much. And T2, which apparently does not have a great 4K release, but we'll find out, because I was cheap too. I grabbed that anyways. And I got RoboCop, which is really the one I really wanted. I did RoboCop too, man. I didn't even know that. Kevin's like, tell me about RoboCop. I was like, dude, I bought RoboCop a couple weeks ago. I had some time off on a weeknight because Martha had family in town, so she was gone for a couple nights. And a co-worker was like, what are you doing with this freedom? I was like, I'm going to go buy myself and make myself a steak and fucking watch RoboCop. That's it. living the dream baby i'm doing this for for men everywhere robocop and steak oh yes i do have robocop rogue city is on my uh is on my wish list so hopefully i'll grab that too because i've heard good things about that game looks pretty pretty insane um yeah what else you got some other stuff going on in your game room yeah i do uh non-pinball stuff so bear with me guys uh so let's see i talked about big buck hunter so big buck hunter is actually coming out with a new uh update they've got a new animal and they're adding the Walking Dead, like, shooting game to the cabinet, and that, I think December 1st is the release date, they just had a trailer for that, so that's cool. Um, I bought a Quest 3, I got that on Friday, so I'm playing around with that, testing it, uh, finally did, like, virtual desktop where I can run PC, uh, Steam games and stream it to my Quest, so I don't have to just use that crappy Quest kind of, like, uh, phone chip, Snapdragon chip, I can actually have my GPU powering it, so I love that. Still playing around testing it, but the Quest 3 so far, good for some impressions. I'll do a plug for the VR Gaming Podcast, which I no longer do, but certainly exists. Justin Davis, who was my co-host, took over for that. Brought in a new co-host, and he's doing a good job. It is VR Carl Weathers, Kevin. I am a VR lover, but I step away from it sometimes for either Carl Weathers purposes, or there's just not been good games. But, you know, if a new headset and there's been a lot of good VR games that seem to be coming out the last month and this month and going forward. So great time to do VR. We've got a Discord, the VR Gaming Podcast. So reach out to me if you want the link for that. Tons of pinball people are in that thing. And if you want to play some VR games with me, that'd be great. I've been playing Ghost of Tabur. Got into that. Just got Dungeons of Eternity VR last night, which is a lot of fun. um i played breaches is a good game i play that game a bunch so um down um dtvr you know uh so a question for you the walking dead game for your big buck hunter is that going to be a reload until your arm falls off kind of game i hope i hope not um it sounds like something i would like to play but i also like my arm yeah yeah so the problem that kevin's alluding to is that you've got to pump these games. It's not like the Terminator game on there, but it's not Terminator Salvation. I forget what it's called. It's based on Terminator Salvation, but it's a little more forgiving than just that, but you've still got to pump so much that if you don't play that game regularly, you're going to... After the first mission, you're going to be like, I'm sore. So, we'll see what they do for that. I don't know. I don't know. Hopefully it's a little more chill. The zombies are a little... If they don't come at you quite as insanely fast, then it would give you a little time to recover. But, yeah. Yeah, you have to pay the monthly. You can buy the module, but that's a stupid price. I don't even know what it is. So, economically, what I do, Saul Hudson, is I just pay $40 a month. I activate my subscription around October, and I'll cancel it probably in April, so the winter months when I might pay it, which amounts to, I don't know, $200-some. rather than like they probably want like $1,200 just for that module, which is fucking stupid. You're not going to get your money's worth on it. But if you pay $40, you get all the content. So just do it for a few months when you're actually going to play it. And then when you take your machine offline, you get like the five core animals. So if you ever want to scratch the itch and shoot animals, you can still do that. That's my recommendation. All right. Question from chat. Garrett Pace on YouTube wants to know, what kind of steak? That's the question. What kind of steak did you have? Probably a New York strip. Nothing special because I didn't go out and do it on the grill. So, you know, I'm not going to go crazy and get anything special. That's fair. That's fair. We had a bunch of trolls for Q&A this month. Nick Kaiser wanted to know if you sold your air conditioner, your dehumidifier signed by Barenaked Ladies. I figured I'd give you a chance to plug it here if anybody wanted to buy it. Yeah, it's probably going to have to just go out to recycling because I can't sell it. But where's my ad? I wasn't prepared, Kevin. I would do an ad read for it because I think I did a good job marketing it. But I only had one serious inquiry. Somebody who's looking to – because these things are – by the way, When a humidifier is broken, the repair cost is too much. You might as well just go and buy a new one because I looked into it. Where's my listings? I don't fucking know. Where's my stuff? Finance. Anyways. Is it possible? Yeah. Sorry, I don't know where it is. Otherwise, I'd read it. But Ed Ed Robertson. You can give the summary of what it is. Yeah. So Ed Ed Robertson, when he came over on the stream back in 2016, we had him sign our dehumidifier, which is by the only dehumidifier signed in existence by Ed Ed Robertson. And it's been definitely a family heirloom. And it finally stopped working after like, I don't know, seven years of service. It was really heartbreaking. So I wanted to see if there's any super fans who want a broken dehumidifier signed by Ed Ed Robertson of the Baronecki Ladies. And no one jumped on that offer. So your loss. It even made an appearance on the radio, like a local radio station picked it up and promoted it. Yeah. It's pretty famous now. It is pretty famous. All right. So anything else? Are we good? Is that the show? Did we do it? Oh, I've got the ad. Hold on. Okay. All right. This is going to load up. Let's see. I fucking hate you, Facebook. I hate you for multiple reasons. By the way, it killed me buying a Quest because I fucking hate you, and I know you're mapping my house, you motherfucker. Motherfuckers. Motherfuckers. Can I view my own listing? View, oh my god, I had to click. Why is it showing me a picture of it? Why can't I see the text? Oh, you fucking hate you. I fucking hate you so much. Yeah, I don't know. I tried. I tried. All right, that's going to do it for another episode of Brody and the Angry Ball. Thanks for tuning in. you can give us a follow up they want us to talk about Puny Factory off Todd Tucky's roof we're not talking about that because I don't want to give that guy any money no we're not talking about that I'm drawing the line he should not get any money for that who Todd Tucky? no the other guy the guy that bought it and wants everybody to pay we can trash him I think it's stupid I don't want people to hear well it's too late now people are going to hear this well it's in chat too so you got to talk about it It's all over. We got to do it. All right. All right, fine. Idiot Don bought this Puny Factory knowing it was going to be a pile of trash from Andrew McBain, the Puny Factory guy, who has a history of being garbage. They're both garbage. Garbage people. Now that he got the garbage product That he was probably going to get the whole time He wants people to Give him money to Throw it off a roof Basically he wants to get his money back For this piece of trash that ended up being a piece of trash That he That he knew was going to be that So bottom line Don't give this guy any money Ignore it let these guys Get mad at each other And go play pinball instead There's something terribly morally, ethically wrong and disturbing about this. Oh yeah, this idiot bought a punny factory, and now he's trying to get people to give him money, and if he gets enough money, he'll throw the thing off a roof and destroy it. No, if you don't like the game, just donate it to some children's hospital. I mean, they're suffering enough, I get it, so maybe not. But give it away to somebody. like why why are you destroying this this is this is stupid it's wrong um i love todd tucky i don't know him well but like i i'm sad that he's involved in this like though i know like this guy like i i get it this guy was a dick to todd tucky like don't destroy pimp don't throw up him all working pimp all machine well i don't even know if this thing's working even this game's trash is a dumpster fire don't give this guy money so he improves his cost let him suffer he deserves it for buying a piece of trash uh don't destroy this this thing this is so much wrong this is this is terrible anybody should be embarrassed who's involved in this this whole operation it's it's so wrong and terrible i'm repulsed by it and it's it's misleading too because gofundmes are typically for charity so i i've heard people saying oh wait this isn't money is not going to charity no it's going to to line his pockets for this piece of garbage that he But it's not a charity thing. It's not for goodwill. It's, it's just, it's bad. Just ignore it. I didn't want to talk about it at all because now we're just putting more literally like lighting money on fire, burning money. Like it is, it is disgusting. It is absolutely disgusting. So, um, sorry, anybody's participating in it. We're a hundred percent against it. So there you go. Uh, all right, that's going to do it. You guys did it. Give us a follow all our social media channels, uh, Twitter. Well, X, uh, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. We're on Discord. If you want to hear Jay every once in a while, you can talk about the latest happenings in the Dave Matthews band world with Jay. You can do that on our music channel in Discord. Email us, talkpinball at gmail.com if you want feedback for the show. If you want to send us a note, a question for the next show, you can do that there. You can subscribe on Twitch. You can support us on YouTube. you can do super chats or whatever they call it following us I don't know you can do the YouTube equivalent of subscribing but that's subscribing on Twitch is something different it's all very confusing but we appreciate any donations and any support that y'all give us if you want to give us a review go to your favorite podcast platform of choice and review us there it helps other people find the show and you can go to buffalopinball.com slash merch if you want a sweet shirt shirt, a mug or sticker. I think those are the, all the things we have on there. We have Brody even pinball shirts, Buffalo pinball shirts, um, stickers, mugs. Oh, uh, play angry is up there now. We got, we got all that stuff. So, uh, more pinball machine reviews. I know we, we want to do more reviews, especially the new games, but we want to also have more time on the games before we review them. So a lot of times there's this mad rush to review games. Uh, I think it's unfair Before you really understand And appreciate a game to review it We're trying to do that As a quote unquote content creator The rush Is to be the first one out with a review First hot takes and all that To get the views and the clicks If you notice Kevin and I Don't chase clicks and reviews Our thing is always to be helpful And entertaining We did give an impression of Venom which I think is the fairest approach. We didn't give it a value. I think you have a number. But maybe if by some miracle we have enough time to go over and play Venom at our friend's place, we can give a review. Spoiler alert, it's probably not going to be a great review. You can kind of read between the lines of how we feel now. I doubt anything is going to radically change. But, again, we're not there. We don't have enough time to be fair to the designers in Stern and anybody who values our opinion. There you go. So in the meantime, we'll be playing pinball on Twitch and YouTube streaming. We'll have Final Resistance coming up and other good stuff. So give everything a B+. There you go. Done. Have a great time, and we will see you next time on the next Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball?